Another June, another boxing spree… I pulled some folded up boxes out from under my bed this week to get ready to pack everything in my room, and looked over the descriptions written on the side of one of the boxes. “BOOKS,” it said, followed by “7/99 6/01 8/02 5/04.” I crossed out the last one, wrote “6/05” and filled it with books again.
Every year since 1993 save one, I’ve moved. In 1995, I moved twice to make up for it, so all in all, this move will be my thirteenth in thirteen years. And next summer, we’ll move again – but at least this year we’ll be moving together, and it will be a bit closer to a feeling of permanence. I’ve gotten a lot of practice boxing up everything and lugging it around, from triple to double to single, from faculty housing to a studio apartment to a shared house or three, but I’m ready to be done.
The downstairs neighbors who provided password-free wireless internet access also moved, sometime last week, and with them they took “DI-524,” formerly “wireless,” the magic words that meant free internet for the past year. I have to mention “h-bomb” as well, the free wireless that kept us going for two years at 507 Putnam; it’s time to move up to the real deal this fall, but I have to say thanks to those who’ve unwittingly kept me connected over the past few years.
Aimee and I spent our last free weekend in Boston doing some fun Boston things, and some necessary preparation for the wedding. Saturday morning, after a nice breakfast at Steve’s, I met up with Gary from Photo-Me USA at a retailers convention at the Hynes ICA in Boston. I got in with my very own “Vendor” ID badge, and chatted with Gary about photobooths while surrounded on all sides by the kind of stuff that’s sold from pushcarts in the hallways of malls: your face laser-engraved on a glass ball, a cd of songs with your kid’s name in the lyrics, and a water-massage on a bed. It was a strange and enjoyable experience, for sure.
Unable to complete the bi-fecta (?) of touring both the Harpoon and Sam Adams Breweries thanks to the Harpoon Brewstock that we chose to avoid, we headed to the Sam Adams Brewery, deep in the warren that is Jamaica Plain, and enjoyed the brief, somewhat garbled tour that was concluded with samples of the Boston Lager, the Summer Ale, and some early Octoberfest.
We were a little disappointed to learn they don’t actually brew and bottle any beer there, but do only some sample and quality control stuff on site. The beer you and I drink is brewed in North Carolina, Cincinnati, or Rochester – I see another field trip coming up…
We watched the HBO adaptation of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, a book we had both enjoyed reading very much. The film was neither here nor there, well done but not particularly engaging, not embarassing but not totally pleasing. Paul Newman gave a charming, lively performance, and I’m thankful every time I see him on screen these days. My beef, besides the problematic accents that Aimee pointed out, was with the fact that the director and cinematographer felt that the camera needed to be in constant motion, always making the viewer aware that it was moving, as though it were sliding slowly by on a sheet of ice, trying to create some sense of heightened emotion by being in motion. It was amazingly distracting and made the film feel like a Hallmark made-for-tv movie, instead of a smart adaptation of a witty, well-written book. I feel like director Fred Schepisi has made some decent and funny films like Roxane and Six Degrees of Separation, but this one wasn’t particularly either of those things.
This afternoon, we had lesson number two in “Learning to Drive a Manual Transmission Car” for Aimee. Lesson number one was two summers ago near the Swensons’ place in Maine in an empty water utility company parking lot. This time, we had to do some searching, and came upon an office park in Medford that fit the bill nicely. Aimee did a great job learning to balance the clutch and the gas to start from a standstill, and we had a nice breakthrough to figure out exactly the point at which to start giving it the gas. The lesson went great, and we got up to third gear and back down again, but I’m sorry to say the point was a little undermined when, as soon as I took over the wheel again, the car started stalling and continued to do so all the way home. I think it was tried of stopping and starting in 90-degree heat, and it made for a very interesting drive through Davis Square back to Inman, as I either kept the rpms at 2000 while at a stop light, or let it stall and re-started it every time I had to slow down. My car’s performance wasn’t a great advertisment for driving a stick-shift car, but Aimee’s well on her way to getting it mastered.
